What the interviewer is looking for#

• How well you manage communication across groups, as well as cross-team collaboration and stakeholder management.
• How you prioritize and execute tasks around requirements. There will always be competing requirements coming in from all sides, and, as an engineering manager, you have to prioritize and put a cost factor on everything.
• Whether you take a balanced approach or zoom in on the limitations and try to overrule your customer’s concerns.
• How you empathize with the customer’s concerns and demands.

What a good answer looks like#

“When you’re faced with certain customer requirements, it takes a bit of maneuvering to get the right amount of information from your client. Sometimes, they will tell you about the ideal solution they want without expanding on the problem. Once you identify the problem, the engineering limitations can be identified, and a solution drafted.

An example from my career is that once, our sales and marketing team wanted us to integrate a particular product with our system. They were adamant about this and were unwilling to consider alternatives. I realized their decision was a premature one based on certain very valid issues. In a meeting with them, I laid down all the repercussions of their decision in front of them, like certain technical issues, all the things they would have to keep in sync, and all the hours that would be spent in maintaining the whole thing. We decided to take a pros and cons approach in trying to explain to them how to decide which product to use. We identified the pros of the product they wanted and then listed the cons as well. This is how we were able to figure out another way.

The important thing was clearly communicating with the customer—in this case, our sales and marketing teams. I had to make sure their concerns were acknowledged and heard, but given that my team and I were the ones who understood how things worked on the engineering side, we had to present a clear picture of what exactly they wanted and what would be the outcome in the long run from an engineering standpoint.”